She wears pearl studs, lobes made softer by freshwater edgelessness. Her lips break open like a bottle christening when she laughs. She has two good haunches in blue jeans. They are the type of blue jeans worn by older women who have not yet lost their shape, high around the waist in the style of ranches and an equal share of the man's work. After all, she is the same age as the aunts and childless hippies who wear their gray hair in desperate braids, improbable as the fertility of mules, wearing strap sandals that leave clammy tan-lines in September. But she is well-preserved—avoids modern poetry, new teas, and Buddhist temples to good results. She fits into those blue jeans very nicely next to her husband with sleeves rolled up to reveal brown forearms traced with the white penmanship of informal scars. He can name to you where he got each one, because he used to be proud of them, but scars hold a different meaning when your two daughters have begun using cream under their eyes and at the corners of their mouths and live in different cities than you do.
As any good mid-west preacher, he cleans up nicely on a Saturday in Levis and a shirt loosened of two buttons. He does not hold his wife around her waist as you might expect as they host the church picnic behind their colonial, at the foot of a grain house with a view of a hobby hay field. Instead, she grills the meat while he serves the potato salad, which is his recipe, or, at least his mother's recipe which uses a whole meadow of red onions and is served to all the guests whether they like it or not, because it is well-advertised by the preacher himself, and he is a respectable man, having raised two thousand head of cattle every year for thirty years. He also served in the navy, but bovine computations hold a heavier clout in such a valley, which even so flies a good number of flags in early July, and sends a son or two to the military at regular interval.
She cooks the meat and flirts with the congregational men, but maybe she doesn't know it, though she wears the blue jeans right on her belly, and so it is evident how well-kept her body is. Her hair is naturally still that vital color of eastern syrup winters. She is at the head of the school board in town, and is running for a seat on the city council this coming election season. I have known her all of two weeks, but I have seen every part of her life, especially the Christmases and the young men and the tactics in marriage. I have seen how as a child she would catch big dirigible bees in her socks and shake them up, with the intention of making them dizzier. You know, I shudder at this now, because of how scarce bees are, and how sympathetic they are to the plight of our orchards' proffered pistils. I have seen four years at Harvard University, where she got a degree in theology, and learned about dry, sea-bed texts, and the many names of God. How many of those names does she use at night, in prayer or otherwise. Her husband serves me a plate of potato salad. I'm new, so he introduces himself and asks me where I come from. I'm from Atlanta, and I went to the New Harmony Congregation on 8th street. He has strong features, and I pay close attention to his handshake, because you can tell all a man is and what sort of business he's in by the shape and depth of the grip of his hand. I like the hands of men you can barely fit your own around and it is like shaking the width of a two by four. This man has pulled twenty-two stumps from uncleared land with thick chain. He has fallen off a roof twice. He branded his own cows, pressed his cheek against their cord necks as they thrashed in the dirt with knees and felt the unison of blood in systemic crochet. Yes, you can tell that from a handshake. I can also tell how he likes his wife when she says one of the many names of God in the night, otherwise of prayer.
I watched them last night as they prepared for the picnic. Afterward, she rode horses and he went indoors. There is a lot to be said about a man who goes indoors while his wife rides on her own. She rode with her hair down and with a straight face, as she supposed horses should be ridden with. The evening was a meeting of horse and current. She moved in and out of the animal like a tight turn, blurred, and feeling what her husband felt against shitless cattle. I saw all the other horses she had ever ridden in the way she maneuvered her elbows, and kept her knees tucked into the breadth. One was a red-splotched mare, they call them roans, its knotwork of intentions, and manes. I have seen her as a young girl on saddles. She is pretty, and you would think that her father owned every quadruped in the dry state. She rides as if there is romance one hundred miles south.
I don't get meat quite yet. I eat the potato salad, which should be famous, considering the audacity of the sweltering onions. She wipes her hands on her jeans, against her thighs. She does not debate God with anyone. If you can tell everything there is about a man by his handshake, you can likewise tell about a woman by the uprising angle of her chin from the floor, as if the pulse in her throat was the dangle of an astrolabe and you could calculate how many men she has shamed by the height of the stars in her eyes. Boys have died for lesser angles, for it is well known that love is a geometry—a logarithm in passion, an asymptote in middle-aged settling, a triangle in roadside affairs. It is hard for me to see circles, as you might think, and comprehend them, and squares are so achingly four-walled.
But she is all angles and circumferences and bilaterals as she serves up meat on doubled-up paper plates. She prays every night. These are the devout prayers a person who knows nothing about God. Hands clasped, elbows on the bedsheets as she kneels with her hair undone, slashing over her shoulder like a routine burn, with furrowed brow. She mouths each word without saying it—I am sure of that. I wanted more than anything to be in that room to hear the cusped, glossless sound of her lips parting and recombining. I know everything about God. I pity the parents and sponsors of this woman, who helped pay for four years at Harvard's School of Divinity, which produced an alumni of such devotion and bedside desolation and utter failure in coming to know god.
The prayers gave me pause, and still do.
But she is the life of the party, as well as the Red Hat Society, the Scholarship Committee, and the Rotary Club.
The cicadas cease with suddenness, and a late summer paranoia sets in with the silence, like a discreet click at the end of a phone call. The chickens in the yard pick up the slack. The preacher kisses his wife's neck when he comes behind her and you should see how her face lights up. No, it gleams— with the luminosity of faith in blindness. She whispers something in his ear, and he turns to the crowd.
“Folks, inside, my wife has a marvelous dessert. If you stay a little longer, she'd like to go in and get it.”
The dessert is peach-based, cobbled out of the orchards—I know because I watched as she prepared it after riding horses on an English saddle, with all its murmurs and paddles of shy leather. The pride in serving friends and family fruit formed of one's own trees is the smile she addresses to the picnic before moving toward the house. The Preacher squats to the level of his granddaughter, who has just arrived with his oldest, who in turn bears a belly swollen as empty weather. I follow his wife after the dessert. She trots up the steps to the house as I move among the trees and clapboards, the windows since reduced to screens at the heat, and a piebald cat slinking along the meridian. I don't even look back to see if anyone is watching as I catch the door before it closes. It's nice to be inside. The ceiling is low, the decorative scheme is blue tin, and every scent of the house is centralized in the kitchen, including her odors, unmasked now from cooking meat and entertaining an August of guests. There are portraits of her children on the wall. On the desks, there are framed pictures of her husband, and also her accomplishments, and their wedding, busting with the silk of a magician's sleeve. I move toward the kitchen. I do not slink, but I am curious. I have only known her two weeks, after all. There are things that still surprise me.
When she turns around with a tray of peach cobbler, rich with crumble, she sees me in the doorway. She is unfrightened.
“The bathroom is down the hall, first door on the right. Do you want to give me a hand with the other tray?”
She makes to move past me.
“Excuse me.”
I sidestep the cobbler very easily when I take her up by her wrist and her mouth. I put my face into her neck, her ear, her pearl stud, which I taste like a head-water. She is younger than I imagined. I did not come here for her high, elderly jeans exactly. I came for her to know about God and to ruin horses. I came for every Christmas, and for the bees that died in her left sock.
She doesn't bite or scream.
She prays and I am merciless.
